Moving

     If there is one thing I have learned from moving a long distance, it is that it is not a venture for the poor. Only now do I truly understand how and why poor people are literally "stuck" in poor places. The simple movement of our things, which was about 26 boxes plus a sled, was around $2,300. I personally feel this is an outrageous sum of money. If you saw those 26 boxes piled together in the corner of our apartment, I think you would agree with me that it is not that much for a married couple's entire material life, sans furniture. They were medium-sized cardboard boxes.

     After attempting to get them transported by truck through major moving companies (out of around 5, the lowest price quoted to us was just over 3,000 dollars), we then turned to Fed Ex and UPS, whose employees all seemed in confusion about whether they could move anything that wasn't in a standard-size box internationally. Then, attempting to avoid any sudden surprises since we were getting 3 different answers out of each company, we moved to airliners. Did you know you cannot use airliners to ship household goods since 9/11? That's what we found out. So we eventually had to throw out our mattress and bikes that we were trying to move, and drive everything down to the USPS. Who still would not ship any boxes that weren't perfectly square (thankfully we only had 2 of these, and we ended up shipping them through FedEx for an exorbitant fee that I only vaguely know the true price of because it was so terrible, the exact amount was not shared with me out of fear for my fragile constitution). And so the final price came to around $2,300. We can at least tell you that we saved about 700 dollars by not shipping them on a trucking palate. However, we are not done paying for them yet. Any slightly expensive packages get charged some sort of international border fee (and this is even AFTER we were declared duty-free), and the fee is not that slight, as in, it can sometimes be over one hundred dollars.

     Right now, after being here two weeks, our boxes trickle in by the day, yet we have not quite received half of them yet. I am stuck at home everyday because we have learned that the post office will not re-deliver, and we do not have a car, so it is a mean feat to carry some of our 50-pound boxes even the few blocks from the post office to our apartment, which is necessary if we were not there to collect it at the time of delivery. This also has me in a state of constant stress that I will be taking a shower or sleeping when an important or especially heavy box arrives, and then Race will have to trudge in the cold the next day so we can have our things. Oh, Things. It's really nice when they're here, but getting them here is SUCH a bitch. I really do not think that dealing with the post office (which COMPLETELY DESTROYED our rice cooker and dented our STEEL muffin pan) and having to be house-arrested for fear of missing a delivery for several weeks is worth 700 dollars. It is just too stressful. Next time we move, I will hire movers to pack our things so they are 100% liable if they are broken, and make sure everything arrives at once, even if I have to go into debt doing it.

     I wanted to wait to write about Montreal itself until I had a camera connection to the computer so I can post pictures (though I will probably come back to this and post the picture of the rice cooker because it is kind of unbelievable), so sorry for this downbeat topic, because moving is NEVER fun. But it is necessary, to move on to having fun exploring new horizons!